A Reg contributor who was unlawfully arrested and had his home PCs inspected by the Met has received an apology from the police after four years.
David Mery was wearing a coat "too warm for the season" and was carrying a laptop - according to the police who arrested him at Southwark Tube station, the day after the second wave of …

"Public Nuisance"

The article says he was co-operative, but presumably they must have had *some* tenuous reason for declaring that he was a public nuisance? Surely even the Police can't stretch it as far as an inappropriate jacket constituting a public nuisance?!

reminds me of.....

Fashion Police

I can see why the police stopped him, wearing a coat in summer the day after suicide bomb attacks, however the subsequent treatment is well out of order.

However does this means the boys in blue are now baton wielding trinny and susannahs? Am I gonna get CS gassed in the face for wearing boot cut instead of straight cut jeans? Are we now subject to arrest if we are wearing a coat that is in last seasons colour? Are all my sartorial choices now subject to criminal sanction? If so, im fucked as im one of lifes scruffy buggers! I think we should be told.

The coppers have had a talking to? They will be pissing themselves laughing in the pub after this. The police do themselves no favours these days do they. Every day you will see stories such as this. Is it the quality of recruits? I know you dont actually need any qualifications to be a copper, but does that mean they actually have to employ fucking morons? Do they have a quota for employing the mentally challenged? Or is it just that we see reporting of the fuckwits in blue doing their stupid/bullying/criminal shit?

Thing is, I actually know quite a few coppers in a variety of forces. All of them are decent folk and Im pretty sure they are good coppers, and I dont imagine they are much different from most (well one of them might not be above giving scumbags a shoe-ing etc etc to be honest!)

Perhaps a few stories of police doing decent things for change, for a bit of balance. Or do these stories not exist?

Wearing a brightly coloured shirt...

I acutally stopped wearing my leather trenchcoat

After being stopped 3 times in one week (twice at Kings Cross, once at Euston), I finally gave up wearing my trenchcoat and started wearing my far more dangerous leather biker jacket (Lots of armour and bulky enough to hid nasty things in).

And in America?

@David Lee

There are two reasons I can come up with that the "good copper" stories don't get published. One, being basically decent to the public is what they SHOULD be doing, so even if 999 out of a thousand cases are of this sort, they're still all "dog bites man" stories. Ho-hum. They don't make good news because that's what they should be doing.

The second is related; except in cases of true heroism, no one bothers to report such stories to the news. Hell, when I was a teenage kid my car died with an electrical problem in the middle of a 5 lane street. I was in the turn lane, didn't look out of place, so it wasn't until I rolled down my window and waved frantically at a passing squad car that I actually got any attention. When the cop did come over and find out the problem, he a) blocked traffic, b) helped me push my car off the street, and c) gave me a ride home. All he was required to do was a). Did I call the papers? No. I did tell friends and family though. It's also the one event that reminds me that not all coppers should be strung up from trees; it's just the ones that should that you end up hearing about.

Admiiting mistakes

All agencies are going to make mistakes at times, especially after the panic and worries that arose as a result of the bombings and the attempted repeat a fortnight later. Some of those mistakes are going to be fatal. Systems will go wrong, guidelines produced quickly in an environment of stress will go wrong in practice, and in some cases they will be applied by some not-very-competent or experiecne people. Some of those mistakes will be fatal, and also there will be those who misuse the situation.

However, the absolutely the gold standard of any civilised and democratic society is what happens later within powerful institutions. The immediate, and almost automatic reaction in any bureaucratic organisation is going to hide within the system. It's incredibly difficult within such organisations to find individuals that can, or will, take responsibilities for mistakes. The responsibility gets spread and becomes institutionalised. Kafka knew this - it's hardly a news thing.

However, what really needs to be addressed here is just how long it takes for organisations such as the police here to be held to account and admit that they basically over-reacted and assessed the situation wrongly. There were excuses - the panic that was arround at the time and a lot of unknowns, like the real extent of the threat. That's the bit that needs dealing with - the way in which mistakes are dealt with and changes made. Commercial organisations ultimately get hit by loss of custom - with outfits like the Police, we don't get much choice and the whole system relies on democratic controls (which are singularly lacking in this case).

Defence?

Anyone know if it is legal to use appropriate force to resist unlawful arrest? Naively I would suppose that an illegal arrest, being not an arrest, just becomes plain assault by a police officer and assault by anyone is surely grounds for reasonable defensive action.

Not sure I would try it even if the answer is yes, but it would be nice to know

LOL at road death toll (see comment above)

@Defence?

Yes, you may resist unlawful arrest. However you'll discover that the Met can *and will* bring more force to bear than you can. The advice from the Courts is, therefore, to sue.

You'll also find that the Met nearly always wins the cases that go to court, even the ones that look hopeless. If you do the analysis you'll note that there is one particular judge that takes almost all of the cases involving the Met., and he always finds in their favour (although sometime overturned on appeal).

Obligatory Pratchett remark

The Met

They can't come out for a burglary but damm can the come down hard on coat wearing in Summer.

What they (and the Government's senior law officer, Baroness Scotland) don't get is it's *not* the incident, it's the handling that sticks in people's craw.

This is an act by an over zealous policemant (I'd call him trigger happy but mercifully most UK police do not carry guns as a rule) who should have apologised within a day. And being a non-crime should not have needed DNA retention either.

Thumbs up for sticking to it. This is the only way to change Police behaviour. One complaint at a time.

Sue them for goodness sake!

Re: Defence? Not in the antipodes mate.

Transit cops were giving a commuter a hard time here recently. A Seriously over the top hard time. A young woman attempted to intervene and got herself bent backwards over a stair rail with an arm across her throat for her troubles.

Top transit cop's media response essentially translated to an admission of excess with respect to the first commuter. But no sympathy for commuter #2, who should not have attempted to interfere with an on duty officer. (unspoken but strongly implied: 'whatever that officer was doing.')

As for resisting an unlawful arrest in your own person, I susspect you'd be well and truely fooked, because the moment you try, you've automatically committed the offense of resisting arrest. And enormously multiplied your chances of (repeatedly) "falling down the stairs".

On death rates

Absolutely fucking disgusting!

So you're sorry, for the distress? 4 years of it?! You send your little letter, apologise and walk away from it all, meanwhile this guy, who did nothing more than wear a large coat on a warm summer day, has to spend the next few years piecing his life back together?

A disgrace to the Met and this country's so called history of freedom.

Hope this never happens to me...

Almost every piece of IT equipment I own is encrypted, not because I have anything to hide but because if the unthinkable happens and I'm burgled, or robbed of my laptop, I want that small peace of mind that comes from knowing the thieving scum may have my hardware but they won't have my address books, passwords or personally identifiable data to do with as they please.

On the other hand, if the authorities ever confiscate my gear on a desperate trumped-up premise like they did to this poor bloke, what are they going to think when they see encrypted drives all over the place? I'd have no problem with handing over the keys to prove there's nothing shady stored within, but by this time they may well have drawn their own conclusions using the "no smoke without fire" legal framework and choose not to believe a word I say.

Process map?

The linked article on how to delete your DNA from the record says:

To avoid others having to go through this same situation, I shared these concerns with the SCD12 Senior Information Manager. The outcome: "An exceptional case process map will be available on the MPS Publication Scheme early 2008."

looking through the MPS Publication scheme documents, it doesnt appear they have published such a process map yet.

police state

The police state is just around the corner folks. In the UK and USA, it's become not only common, but ACCEPTED that the police will lie, cheat, and otherwise do whatever they want. From falsifying statements to making up the rules as they go along, when the police are unaccountable then we have the start of a police state. When caught, nothing happens to the officers involved, and nothing happens to those who gave the orders. They're free to get away with it again. That's called being unaccountable.

Wankers.

Lucky....

Rita, Sue and Bob too?

"Yes, you may resist unlawful arrest. However you'll discover that the Met can *and will* bring more force to bear than you can. The advice from the Courts is, therefore, to sue."

Unless you're a solicitor, no? Scroogle 'arrested a solicitor' or 'arrest a solicitor' and see how many hits you get. Now I'm not suggesting that one should pretend to be a solicitor - that's going to get you into very hot water indeed - but it does strike me that the police will try it on with anyone they suspect doesn't know the law.

Besides, why are the courts giving this kind of advice? Surely they're not just touting for business?

The usual...

Congratulations on standing up to city hall!

Greetings and Salutations..

I am glad to see the update on this disgraceful situation, and to see that there is finally some recognition by the government that they were in the wrong. While I would not hold my breath while waiting for this to actually CHANGE their behavior, it is a good point and perhaps may do something to slow the descent into a Totalitarian Police State.

Terrorism is an awful thing, and should be condemned where-ever it raises its ugly head. However, for the government to use that excuse to suddenly consider every citizen to be a dangerous enemy of the state, and, to move on to implement the record keeping, constant surveillance and tight control of a Totalitarian Police State is a horrible way of dealing with the problem. This sort of reaction, and the way the government acted to attempt to PROVE the rightness of their actions in this example, simply means that the terrorists are winning.

The only way we (both in America and Great Britain) can truly win against terrorism is to maintain our free society in spite of it.